MAKE A DELIBERATE INTENTION TO MEET FORCES THAT COMPOSE A LIMIT OF THE WORLD.

[Take this to be an obligation.]

BEFORE SETTING OUT, INVENT A PRACTICE FOR TURNING AT THE LIMITS OF THE WORLD.

[Once you arrive you will not be able to think abstractly or act directly.]

SET OUT FOR A GEOMORPHOLOGICAL EDGE.

[Do research. Find a geomorphological edge where human and nonhuman forces converge and delimit one another. Define the route, timing, mode, support, and affordances of travel. Each of these will prove to be highly consequential.]

ARRIVE.

[You will arrive for the first time only once. Feel the forces of this place for your own body/brain/mind (and not as represented in guidebooks, research, others’ photos, habitual assumptions).]

RE-TUNE THE MEDIA. MAKE THEM ABLE TO SIGNAL WHAT THE FORCES OF EDGE-NESS DISCLOSE HERE.

[Choose or reinvent media on the spot—something capable of attuning to forces at play at this particular moment and edge. Use them to signal the “edge-ness” that is being delivered at this place by geomorphological materials and human and nonhuman events right now. Use the media to signal what is being disclosed here.]

LOCATE THE SITE-MOMENT OF GOING NO FURTHER.

[Collaborate with forces that are in the midst of making/remaking the limits of the world here. Sense how these forces indicate when and how they deliver limits here. Use the media and your body/brain/mind to sense when and why you will declare: “just enough” and turn.]

PAUSE THERE.

[Co-exist with the zero and the infinity that is your declared turning point, your human+nonhuman limit. Experience a long exposure. Like a photograph, let impressions accumulate via any means you choose.]

PERFORM THE TURN.

[This is not a defeat. Declaring “just enough” and turning at the limit is not (ever) “turning back.” Rather, it is to inflect your own movement in response to addressing and being addressed by limits of this world. It is a heroic act to encounter and take in the limit of the zero—its “full stop.” Your act of turning can be a ritual, it is most definitely a gesture of address to the strange stranger of the limit that is arriving here. Your turning is a highly consequential act. NOT to turn would have significant consequences. To turn has significant consequences. The only thing that you cannot do here is to live in this zero/infinity. The turning point is not liveable. It is an un-liveable state because it is always and only THE TRANSITION itself. The turning point is the trans-siting, the transit, the trans-formation. It is CHANGE ITSELF. You cannot inhabit or know the turning point. You can only pass through it. This passage is the work. It is the practice.]

RETURN A DIFFERENCE.

[It is a heroic act to encounter and take in this fact of the physical universe: to turn is to generate and live a difference. To turn is to acknowledge a limit and live by that limit—but with a generative difference. To turn at the limits is to generate potential and open the future. To turn is to perform the winding up and the letting go into difference and surprise. What is returned by this practice is a difference. A difference is the gift that your turning offers back to the world. It is a bow to the fact that the world is a continuously unfolding configuration and reconfiguration. A bow is a turn, it is a wave form. With this practice, you bow to the difference that the limits of the world make in yourself and in the world. The gesture of turning-bowing returns you to the interlocking material reality that is you+the limits of the world.]

The Turning at the Limits of the World, signaled below, was performed by smudge studio at Öndverðarnes, the westernmost point of the of Snæfellsnes Peninsula, Iceland, on 5.30.14.

Our field research for Future Northwill consist of an “inhabitation project” that will span several locations. We will seek out sites and times where forces of change related to the futures of the “North” are unfolding with particular intensity, palpability and exquisiteness. We will inhabit built structures, landscapes, and events at volatile edges of forces of change as “field stations” or “apertures” for observing, sensing, documenting, and creatively responding to “forces of change” in play on a daily basis around us. We imagine making observations about, and creative responses to, global forces of change, and how they are reshaping daily, lived experiences and meanings of “North-ness.”

We will use the immediacy of new digital media to slow down, pay deep attention, move-with, and make-from-within events and forces of change itself. We wager that the lively, alter-world in the midst of emerging right now will catch us and gesture back. Much of what we need for this project will be learned and invented along the way.

We intend that creative works resulting from our inhabitations at such edges will put the projects’ diverse sites into relation to one another. We want to offer dynamic images and stories of how the unprecedented intensities, scales, and speeds of contemporary change are inflecting human daily life, imaginations, and acts of building and making. The inhabitations will allow us to move-with some of these new directions, and make something of the generative potentials they offer to designers, artists, and citizens.

We intend to create dynamic tracings of the arrival of new futures of the North into widespread human + nonhuman cognizance. Works that result from Inhabiting Change may take the form of a series of linked multi-media dispatches. We also intend to compose a collaborative, human + nonhuman voice with multiple, moving points of view—while we live and make in the midst of the forces of change that currently are composingemerging futures north.

*all images this page FOP/smudge studio unless otherwise noted.

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“Arisa had come to Tokyo to perform a sort of ritual. A necessary ritual, though perhaps no ritual is unnecessary, it must be done because that is what a ritual is.” — from “Breakfast” by Toshiki Okada

“We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.” — from Dark Mountain Manifesto

“As far as she was concerned, Tokyo was gone, but only because she had loved the city, living here, and because if none of this had happened she would still be living here and because it hurt to admit that Tokyo could never be home again, that was why, without fully knowing it, but half consciously, she had flicked a switch in her head, quietly substituted one thing for another, making it a matter of the city, of Tokyo’s disappearance.” — from “Breakfast” by Toshiki Okada

“I’m not just cooling off, you know. I discovered that if I really let myself spin, it was like I was getting…purified. If I was feeling depressed, I would feel better, as if the depression flew off somewhere as I went around and around. Like I was in a salad spinner. So I began to spin faster and faster. Pushing the limit, you know?” — from “Pink” by Tomoyuki Hoshino

For eight years we’ve used travel and movement as our primary “studio” practice form, and over the last four weeks we’ve moved through various landscapes and built environments in Utah and New Mexico, punctuated by walks into the surrounding landscapes. In addition to experiencing incredibly vast and enduring geologic forms, we’ve also seen the continuing effects of a severe drought, recent and enormous forest fires, torrential flash floods, uranium tailings piles and ever-expanding suburban sprawl into remote and water-scarce landscapes. And, after eight years of making work related to the significant and far-from-resolved accumulation of nuclear materials in the United States, you might say we have become less than optimistic about the likelihood that “solutions” or even a general attentiveness to these complex realities will be recognized in the near future. This all has become coupled with our acceptance that humans exist within a geological reality that is truly indifferent to our survival, even as it, itself, is shaped by human presence.

In the face of these realities, what might compel any human not to simply give up or to simply carry on protesting, mapping or describing the dire circumstances we’re in the midst of, but instead, to sincerely accept what is typically described as “loss”— and then still attempt to write fiction, draw, dance, pause or move with this deeply affecting awareness of irrevocable change?

If a particular human is not up for pretending things are any better than they actually are, and if they aren’t invested in keeping “busy” enough to keep up the pretense of being able to design their way out of present circumstances, then what might they be up for?

What if we started making work that merely draws us closer to these uncomfortable inklings of big, fast, irrevocable changes, instead of away from them? Maybe such work would no longer be about audiences, publics or institutions. And it certainly would not be about recognition and understanding. If we’re no longer making work to communicate “meaning” with others, maybe we’re doing nothing more and nothing less than making this work as way of attuning our individual selves and daily lives to the reality of what’s now in the midst of unfolding around us? Maybe we’re making work that springs from turning and facing the question: What does it take to be with what is right now passing into disappearance, or perhaps is already forever gone?

Such work wouldn’t be about education, “turning the tide”, waking up to a new consciousness, nor calling to action. Rather, we’d like to imagine a growing number of creative people attuning to different registers of the current material realities of daily life and offering images/sensations/words from their deeply felt experiences of those realities—from places and times where this bare reality strikes deep. AND then, instead of turning away from these highly inconvenient and disturbing sensations and thoughts, what if they took the time and did the incredibly hard work to make something from within such sensations and thoughts, without expecting any outcome (especially any company) in return? Perhaps because they must, perhaps because it couldn’t be otherwise, because doing work in such a way and without expectations of outcomes might be what it takes to “go sane” in the Anthropocene.

During our current residency, in addition to spending as much time as possible outdoors, we’ve been attempting to catch-up on some reading. Incredibly, a few pieces have aligned with and further provoked the emerging ideas we outline above. Paul Kingsnorth’s profile in the New York Times Magazine and links to his earlier Dark Mountain Manifesto appeared at just the right moment in our process last month. Kingsnorth was quickly followed by our reading of two mind-blowing pieces of fiction in issue 127 of Granta dedicated to the topic of “Japan.” Toshiki Okada’s “Breakfast” and Tomoyuki Hoshino‘s “Pink” ushered us into a different psychological space (a space of going sane?) for a span of days from which we still haven’t fully returned. What might have been most disruptive about these pieces was the sinking sense that reading their work wasn’t drawing us into fiction, but into contemporary reality. What we take to be “now” is actually the quickly dissipating momentum of the past. Many human cultures are still riding on that momentum, emotionally, politically, economically, cognitively, aesthetically, as we try to navigate the changing present. But the difference, or alter-future, now arriving all around us, can’t be engaged from that version of “now.” As more and more artists offer hyper-real-sensation-al encounters with the material realities of our contemporary circumstances, perhaps the dissonance between no longer viable versions of “now,” and newly merging versions at the hands of such artists, will lessen. In support of that “perhaps,” Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Arrival Gates,” in the same Granta issue and Caroline Bergvall’s new book Drift, are also highly recommended.

In early May we had the rare (for us) opportunity to attend a Native American Feast Day in New Mexico. As outsiders, we had little access to information as to what symbols or dance gestures might mean. But what was quite clear to us, was the fact that many humans have been continuously attuning themselves to the forces of the planet for thousands of years. Physical processes of attunement are inherently coupled with mental and spiritual attunement, and they can create an inner space that, paradoxically, allows one to “leave” one’s narrow perspectives of “here” by attuning deeply to “here.” We started to think that attuning to the immediate events of unfolding change in order to sense widely “out” from “here” and into the massive, interconnected forces that compose change itself might be the most vital skill/capacity to cultivate within our contemporary moment.

On the other side of these experiences, we’re left with a weighty sensation. The release from naive or false hopes that big fast material planetary changes upon us might be reversed, ushers in an ability to create highly vital works that embody a psychological state that is actually OF this change — that is itself within this change, nothing less or more. This release feels like a maturation. We are among the first humans to accept that material realities that afforded our evolution on this planet have irrevocably passed — and we are still living. Authors/artists/humans who share this sensibility are no longer attempting to “save the planet” or ourselves from anything. We’re no longer “seeking solutions” or attempting to imagine creative responses to our carbon problem or rising sea levels. There is nothing that can resolve or erase what some realize is already here.

Instead, we’re charged with the imperative to navigate and adapt to change as it unfolds. We’re finding that on the other side of this acceptance are days filled with gratitude. We expect less, and we’re able to be newly aware of and accepting what’s here (and not here) already, right now. It’s very likely that events we build expectations for will be cut short, not go according to plan, or even disappear altogether (be it the last almond from California, the last can of tuna or gallon of gasoline or potable water). It is we humans who have ensured the untimely disappearance of incalculable affordances within a remarkably short span of time. Each day is laced with beauty in its inevitable passing. There’s a rolling wave of gratitude, with a still center, that acknowledges there’s more to come and that this isn’t only about us — as individuals or as a species. From here, we begin to imagine appropriate rituals. We become humans in-the-midst of redesigning our lives to be with the changes as gracefully as possible as we tune-up our inner selves.

____

We’re sincerely grateful to the Center for Land Use Interpretation and the Santa Fe Art Institute, whose support over the past month have afforded us the space and time to begin new directions. Thanks too, to Ruth Ozeki and Oliver Kellhammer for passing off Granta Issue 127 at just the right time.

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The relay of the exhibition of our project, Look Only at the Movement, has now arrived at the third of its five venues — the Santa Fe Art Institute (SFAI). The show runs through June 12th. While in Santa Fe we have been graciously welcomed and hosted as artists-in-residence at SFAI. We are happy to announce a public gallery talk in conjunction with the exhibition at the Art Institute on May 12th. All are welcome!

We’re especially honored to have the show open here given the depth of atomic history in New Mexico, ranging from the Manhattan Project and Trinity Test to the ongoing environmental challenges facing the clean-up of Los Alamos and uranium tailings around the state. Perhaps most relevant to our work is the recent closure of WIPP, a key site for our project, due to a radiation leak — something we never could have predicted when we began this project nearly three years ago.

In addition to welcoming responses to our work at upcoming artist talks, we also invite visitors to relay comments in the traveling response book as part of the exhibition. We look forward to receiving local feedback about the project. As we have expressed in our statement for the project, by looking only at the movement of nuclear waste, we have tried to redirect polarized discourses that often “cloak” nuclear materials. We encourage new angles of civic exchange by inviting audiences to engage with contemporary material realities that are simultaneously of us, and far beyond us.

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Truck transporting TRU waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2012, still from Look Only at the Movement

For the next three weeks, smudge/FOP is based in Santa Fe, NM. While here, we’re catching up with the local New Mexican news, which includes the latest updates on “the radioactive puff” released from the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) last February. In case you’re not familiar, WIPP is our nation’s only geologic repository for nuclear waste and specifically handles transuranic waste, not the high-level waste produced through nuclear power generation. The high-level waste continues to accumulate and shelter-in-place at hundreds of sites around the country.

TRUPACT-II containers in parking lot outside the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in 2012, still from Look Only at the Movement

What we found most notable was a remark describing worker culture at WIPP as being “more akin to that of a traditional mine than that of a nuclear facility.” Apparently most workers had no previous work experience in handling nuclear materials or nuclear waste storage. We find this surprising, given the extraordinary ways in which WIPP differs from a mine, perhaps most fundamentally in its mandate for isolating the enclosed materials from the environment for 10,000 years.

Yet, we can empathize with the workers, designers and engineers of this facility. There is no precedent to follow for maintaining deep geologic repositories for radioactive waste in the United States, especially those nested 2000 feet deep within enormous salt deposits, though there are less than encouraging examples to consider in Germany.

It seems important at this moment of change at WIPP that its workers be trained in the highly nuanced and complex skill sets required for preventing and handling nuclear accidents. It also seems important to remember that right now, we are always, already, handling materials that exceed our human capacities to shepherd them into their — and our — deep futures. We’re at the very beginning of an extremely long-term project (millennia, at minimum) of stewardship. We’re past the point of reversing our actions, so we must adapt and attempt to meet these material realities — while recognizing that when we work with nuclear materials we’re engaging complex events of change that set themselves apart from other activities, such as mining, in exquisitely potent ways.

Chihuahuan desert along Highway 285 in southern New Mexico, still from Look Only at the Movement

Each time we return to Wendover we’re reminded of the potent juxtapositions that are highly specific to this particular place. They never cease to fascinate us and draw us back (World War II history, contemporary casino culture, salt playas, empty endless roads, edgy contemporary art, a town divided between two States, to name a few). While here, in addition to installing our work and sharing the informal “opening” with an inspiring group of art students from Montana, we’ve had time to explore and experience some of the vivid contrasts this particular place in America offers.

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We hope you can join us next Wednesday, March 26th at 6:30pm at the Brooklyn Public Library, Central Branch. One half of FOP/smudge studio (Jamie Kruse) will be joined by Andrew Beccone and Dillon de Give. We will be in conversation with Proteus Gowanus co-directors Tammy Pittman and Sascha Chavchavadze. The topic for the evening is “Artists Out of Context: Forays into the World.” We’ll be discussing what it’s like to be Brooklyn-based artists creating work that engages disciples and places other than art communities. Jamie will share some of the experiences and motivations behind Look Only at the Movement and how this travel-based project activated various forms of media, research and performative response. She will also address how upcoming screenings of the work aim to make the reality of nuclear waste transport along U.S. Interstates a point of connection among audiences in disparate geographic locations.

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We’ve been watching the story for days now, though it’s far from making headline news. On February 14, 2014 radioactivity was detected in the open air above ground at our nation’s only deep geologic repository for nuclear waste, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southern New Mexico. We’ve written about WIPP several times on this blog, most recently during the production of our video project, Look Only at the Movement, for which we traveled the same Interstate highway routes that transuranic waste in our country travels — to WIPP.

What did make it into news “mentions,” if not news headlines, is the “puff” of radioactive materials that was released, which included plutonium and americium. The half-life of plutonium is 24,000 years. And, workers at WIPP were exposed.

WIPP was designed to contain waste underground inside the Permian salt dome beneath WIPP for 10,000 years. But some of the waste escaped this week, 10,000 years early. February’s puff constitutes a change in containment status worth noting.

“There is no away to which we can meaningfully sweep the radioactive dust. Nowhere is far enough or long-lasting enough. What must happen instead is that we must care consciously for nuclear materials …the future of plutonium exerts a causal influence on the present, casting its shadow backward through time. All kinds of options are no longer thinkable without a deliberate concealment of the reality of radioactive objects.” – Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World